Rothbard, Bush, and National Security

An article in today's Washington Post suggests that the latest al Qaeda videotape was released earlier than it should have been by our Executive Branch to score some political points. In the process, they compromised a useful intelligence source that had been monitoring al Qaeda for years. The source: a private organization that, in this case, decided to turn their findings over to the government- on the condition the tape not be released before al Qaeda had officially made it publicly available, a condition that was not honored.

More than a little disturbing. The libertarian in me marvels at the ability of a privately run organization to do a better job of intelligence gathering on its own (read: no government contract) than the government's own intelligence agencies who have the advantage of being legally "authorized" to use torture with impunity, tap phonelines without warrants, etc. The libertarian in me also marvels at the ability of the government to completely and utterly destroy the advantage given to them by the hard work of this privately run organization.
I'm not a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, but somewhere, Murray Rothbard is having a great big chuckle.
(HT: Comments from Left Field, Will Bunch at attytood.com)